Weighing, Worming, and Knitting

This morning Beth, John (Beth's son), and I finished weighing and worming the alpacas. They are rather stoic critters and sometimes the only way that you can find health problems is noticing a weight loss.....or if some management is needed. Like these two girls below, brown Sonata and black Chinella are in need of weight stabilization. Chinny will no longer have access to the baby pen for constant access to hay. This picture is proof that these two DO enjoy eating. If you look behind us, everyone else is running to the fence because they spotted a fox crossing the bean field. Not these two....

After we finished our weighing and worming, we came up to the house to prepare Chin's fleece for the show in September. We spread it out and removed lots of VM (vegetable matter) and anything that wasn't consistent with her blanket. Every little fleck of "stuff" shows up on the black and we finally just quit after an hour. Beth was actually using tweezers. We did leave some junk behind. The fleece of huacaya alpacas is folded so that the cut side is on the outside and then put into a plastic bag until the show.

I want to show you this cute hat that I just finished. (That's Beth's horse, Cord, in the background) The pattern was free from SmokyMountainFibers on Etsy. AnnMarie and I are sort of old friends over there.....and we have been following each others blog for it seems like forever. You can get the pattern on her blog for yourself. Her blog is: Here